Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Back in January of 1999, I was lucky enough to attend my first Sundance Film Festival courtesy of the fine folks at Crest National in Hollywood. At the time, the historic film lab and post company was a relative newcomer to the world of optical media replication, but their CD and DVD business was ready for action on a large scale. My buddy and colleague Dean Ramser and I had a blast introducing filmmakers in Park City to DVD and rolling out the company's red carpet -- and I remain ever thankful for my in-the-trenches introduction to this technology which has since rocked the world to profound effect. In a great story entitled DVDs Surge as Back-End TV Market from TV Week, Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen points to $3 billion worth of 2005 expenditures -- just for TV programming being released on DVD (the story suggests that DVD revenues for the year may exceed $12 million). In other reports, Adams Media Research has said that 91% of all U.S. homes will have a DVD player by 2008... and an August '05 press release from research and analysis company Gartner makes it clear that DVD technologies will only grow in importance to individuals in the years ahead.

In future posts here, you may read more about tools, techniques and resources that apply to maximizing the DVD format for marketing, entertainment or other exploits. For now, I thought I'd link you to the company Discmakers, which positions itself as "Your DVD Manufacturing Headquarters." With all those DVD players out there and the increasingly powerful hardware and communications software becoming more readily available all the time, high quality DVD content has never been easier to produce, or more widely consumable. Maybe one of the deals that Crest National or Discmakers are offering will convince you that the time to roll out your own Limited Edition Collector's Item DVD release has finally arrived.